Dark Meat Getting a Leg Up on Boring Boneless Breast

Poultry companies that spent decades breeding top-heavy birds to satisfy America's craving for chicken breasts are hunting for solutions as consumers cluck for more dark meat.

Demand for legs and thigh cuts is climbing as diners tire of white meat and TV cooking shows tout dark meat's richer flavor and softer texture. Sales also are benefiting from growing exports to foreign markets that favor chicken on the bone, and from rising immigrant populations in the U.S..

Stronger demand is lifting prices for the formerly cut-rate meats and helping pull the poultry business out of a slump that led to hundreds of millions of dollars in losses and threw some small producers into bankruptcy. Last year, overall chicken prices fell to a two-year low on supply glut. They rebounded to a new high earlier this month.

ENLARGE

Whole Foods Market
Inc.
recently found itself wrestling with an unusual shortage of thighs. "In the past, it was always a struggle to get rid of the thigh meat," said Theo Weening, the retailer's global meat buyer.

Bell & Evans Holding LLC, a Fredericksburg, Penn., poultry producer that raises 50 million birds a year, says its sales of dark meat to some grocery chains have surpassed those of white meat. Another customer,
Chipotle Mexican Grill
Inc.,
the fast-growing restaurant chain, uses mostly dark meat in its menu, saying it is more flavorful.

"Every single day we have shortage of dark meat. It's getting worse every year," said
Scott Sechler,
owner of Bell & Evans. "Customers started to realize that if you threw them on the grill, they're a lot more flavorful" than other cuts.

Part of the reason for the increase is industry innovation. U.S. consumers prefer buying chicken without the bones, tendons and veins. Poultry processors have gotten better at deboning thanks to new manual and automated methods. Boneless, skinless thigh meat a decade ago sold for just over half the price of boneless, skinless breasts. That gap has disappeared, with prices for both cuts holding around $1.30 a pound for the past nine months, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Price for chicken legs also has doubled over the last decade, to more than 75 cents a pound while prices for breast meat have fallen during that period. The USDA doesn't track total production volumes of different chicken cuts.

Michele Glancey
sees changing preferences play out among students in her Chicken 101 class at The Chopping Block cooking school in Chicago. No longer is there tension over who gets breast meat on the day the class roasts a chicken, she said. "So often now, people go for the leg first," Ms. Glancey said.

The white-dark divide in poultry meat derives from myoglobin, a red-or-purple protein that delivers oxygen to muscle tissue. Muscle meats—like chicken legs—have lots of myoglobin. Game birds that fly often have plenty of myoglobin in their breast meat, too, but broilers, chickens bred for meat, flap their wings infrequently, so their breast tissue contains little of the protein.

There is little public data on how the typical chicken has changed from that breeding. But a 2009 report for the National Chicken Council, an industry group, showed an average chicken produced 17% more boneless, skinless breast meat in 2008 compared with 1999. Dark meat production didn't keep pace, said the report's author,
Thomas Elam,
president of FarmEcon LLC, a Carmel, Ind.-based consultancy specializing in livestock and poultry production.

Rising demand for dark meat is helping the poultry industry recover from a disastrous 2011, measured by losses at publicly traded suppliers, by countering weak prices for white meat.

Tyson Foods
Inc.,
the nation's largest chicken producer by volume, is developing more products made from dark meat than ever before, including a new line of chicken sausages. The company said its grocery-store sales of boneless skinless cuts of dark meat are growing as well.

"Our percent of dark meat sold domestically has improved dramatically," Tyson Chief Executive
Donnie Smith
told investors last month. Tyson is meeting demand by increasing purchases from outside suppliers rather than changing its own production, a company spokesman said.

Analysts say Pilgrim's Pride Corp., the second-largest producer by volume, is using the global reach of its majority shareholder, Brazil-based conglomerate
JBS
SA,
to expand exports of dark meat and whole birds to Asia and the Middle East. Pilgrim's has said it is dedicating one of its U.S. processing plants to filling export orders.

Still, chicken companies face limits to how much further the trend can go. After all, there hasn't been any change in the number of thighs or legs on each bird.

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